HP Color Laserjet Enterprise CP4025dn Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
The CP4025dn is a competent color laser capable of handling high-volume output and presentation materials for small or home offices. The cost per page is low, and output quality is high, but the printer is noisy and big. Read More…

What We Liked…

Built like a tank

Beautiful output

Excellent presentation and brochure features

High duty cycle

What We Didn’t…

Noisy

Bulky

No printed instruction manual

Hokey Eco mode

HP Color Laserjet Enterprise CP4025dn Review

By Susan Glinert, reviewed January 14, 2010

Share This Review:

Clear your workspace: The HP Color Laserjet Enterprise CP4025dn is one hulk of a printer. At 85 pounds and 30x20.5x16.5 inches (with its paper tray fully extended), this color laser printer will require some space in your small or home office, as well as a sturdy desk or stand. Ideally suited for networked use by small-to-medium workgroups, the CP4025dn produces high-quality print and presentation output, albeit at speeds that are on the slow side.

As you start to unwrap the printer, the picture on the box flap shows that three sturdy humans are needed to haul the printer out of the box. Unfortunately, the lifting process was not quite as simple as the little picture suggests. The printer is covered with a plastic bag, and the bottom edges of the unit are smooth and recessed slightly below the Styrofoam supports. Getting hands underneath the unit required a lot of fumbling around before the grips were located. Even then, the plastic bag and shallow grips made it difficult to hang onto the unit.

After we lugged the unit out of the box and onto the desk, we examined the documentation. Printed in minuscule, sans-serif type with small pictures, it only covers the process of setting the IP address (for networked use) and attaching cables. The full manual comes on a CD. No network or USB cable is included, but the power cord is, and thankfully it does not sport an inline power brick.

The sparse front panel has five buttons and a 2-inch LCD screen.

The front panel is tidy, comprising five buttons and a 2-inch LCD screen. The buttons (Help, Home, Back, Cancel, and OK/arrow keys) are easy to figure out. And that’s a good thing, because you need to use them for integrating the printer into a network before installing the software. The rear panel of the printer has three ports: USB 2.0, RJ-45 (10/100/1000BaseTX), and a plate covering the Enhanced IO (EIO) slot that houses the built-in print-server board. (An EIO slot is essentially a PCI expansion slot for printers, seen primarily in higher-end models intended for networked use.)

Before you can use the HP Color Laserjet Enterprise CP4025dn, you’ll need to remove various bits of tape and locks on the printer cartridge. If you forget to do the latter, the printer will remind you when it starts up. After you're done unpacking and unpeeling, setting up the printer via USB is simple, a matter of just plugging it in and installing the software via the bundled CD. Most users opting for a printer of this size, capability, and price, however, will likely be using it on a small-office network. And for networking, the installation process is a bit more complex. After plugging in the printer, attaching the network cable to our network's router, and turning the printer on, we were told to wait for the network to recognize it. We then had to push several buttons to print out a configuration sheet and find out if our router had assigned an IP address. Fortunately, it had, and we didn’t have to set the IP address manually via the front panel. (That's the alternative if your router refuses to see the printer.)

The installation, which included installing the PCL driver, the fonts, and downloading the manual, went smoothly. We also had no trouble printing over the network. However, if you are used to sharing your office with a demure, quiet inkjet, you are in for a rude surprise: This unit is a noisemaker. It’s too loud to place anywhere you need to talk. While printing, it whooshes, rattles, and even clanks a bit. Even when idle, it hums unless idle for a few hours.

There are Ethernet and USB 2.0 ports on the back of the printer. The brickless power cord protrudes slightly from the rear of the printer, meaning you won't be able to place it flush against a wall.

Still, the output made the racket worth enduring. Type was sharp and clear, with no fuzzy edges we could see. Graphics were simply gorgeous, with no fuzzy spots or dot patterns. Much brighter and clearer than you would expect from a color laser, the colors looked especially striking on glossy paper.

We also printed our standard test photograph on glossy photo paper, and, while the quality can’t match that of a dedicated dye-sublimation or inkjet photo printer (our test photo was a bit darker and duller than one printed on an Epson PictureMate Charm), only someone comparing photos from the two different types of printers would notice a significant difference. The high-quality image printing, paired with the unit's excellence at other types of output, makes this printer especially useful for offices that routinely print photographs, such as real-estate brokers.

The image quality may be good, but the CP4025dn's results on our speed tests were a mixed bag. Printing a document with a mixture of text and graphics is a job at which a color laser should excel. But the CP4025dn took 1 minute and 26 seconds to print our 10-page text-and-graphics test document, a job that two much less expensive SOHO color lasers we tested, the Lexmark C546dtn ($699.99) and Xerox Phaser 6140 ($399.99), did almost a minute faster at equivalent settings.

We saw some improvement when printing our standard test document for pure text printing. (This document comprises 20 text-only pages.) On that test, the HP Color Laserjet Enterprise CP 4025dn and the Lexmark C546dtn were within seconds of each other, and both were about 10 seconds faster than the Xerox Phaser 6140.

The CP4025 is a four-ink system, with tanks for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

The CP4025dn accelerated to meet its competition when printing an 8.5x11-inch photo, doing the job in 22.4 seconds, a time that was within a few seconds of the Lexmark and more than a minute faster than the Xerox.

More so than speed, though, what you're paying for here is print flexibility. The printer driver allows considerable customization. You can choose among a variety of output shortcuts: general, two-sided duplex, cardstock, and glossy presentation. (Note, though, that while you'll find a promising-sounding Eco shortcut, it defaults to two-sided duplex printing—it doesn’t actually reduce toner use or save electricity.)

Paper handling is also a strong point. The list of supported paper types is long, and it includes numerous matte and glossy presentation papers, plus a variety of paper weights, cardstock, transparencies, and films. Paper-size options are equally rich, although most people won’t have much use for the Double Japanese Postcard Rotated option. The range of allowable paper sizes is from 3x5 inches to 8.5x14 inches. The duplex options include printing pages for either left-side flipping (for booklets and brochures) or flipping pages up from the bottom (for presentations). Indeed, the printer is especially adept at printing booklets. You can set up special pages (for example, front cover, chapter separators, and blank or custom inserts) and specify that only certain pages be printed on different paper stock.

And for storing that paper, the printer ships with two built-in paper trays: a standard 500-page pull-out drawer on the bottom of the unit, and a single-sheet/multipurpose tray that can hold 100 sheets of specialized papers that might not feed consistently from the built-in 500-sheet multiple-sheet tray (thick paper, label sheets, and the like). The multipurpose tray supports 39 paper sizes, according to HP, including letter, legal, 5x8 inches, 8.5x13 inches, statement, executive, postcard, 3x5 inches, 4x6 inches, and envelopes (No. 9, No. 10, Monarch). The 500-sheet input trays can hold letter, legal, 5x8-inch, 8.5x13-inch, statement, and executive paper sizes.

An overhead view of the CP4025 shows the paper-dispersal tray on top of the unit.

The unit will accept one additional 500-sheet tray, which increases the total paper capacity to 1,100 sheets (two 500-sheet trays, plus the 100-sheet multipurpose tray), and the extra cabinet is useful for paper storage. The optional HP 500-sheet Paper Feeder and Cabinet is available for $499. Also, if you want to print stacks of postcards for office mailings or marketing campaigns, you can purchase HP's Postcard Media Insert Tray for $49. The tray holds 4x6-inch cards, and it's useful for dedicated printing of this size of media, as opposed to having to swap cards into the standard paper tray for the occasional postcard job.

Should you need to use specific color spaces (for example, Adobe RGB 1998), this printer can handle those, as well. Color spaces are useful for accurate printing from a monitor, which represents color as red, green, and blue RGB, to a printer that uses cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). More colors can be seen in the RGB color model than can be printed with CMYK inks, hence good conversion algorithms are required to accurately print what you see on your screen. (A good explanation of creating and using such profiles can be found here.) If you are not interested in this level of precision, you use the default Adobe RGB 1998 profile, which is an industry standard.

We especially liked the final tab in the Printer Document Properties dialog box: Services. From here, you can go directly to online diagnostic tools; support and troubleshooting; manuals; drivers; and supplies. You can also print a color-usage job log and see the status of your device and supplies.

The CP4025dn sports an impressive duty cycle. Recommended monthly print volumes are 2,000 to 7,500 pages, with a whopping duty cycle of up to 100,000 pages. By comparison, the Lexmark C546dtn's normal duty cycle is rated at 4,000 imprints, with a maximum duty cycle of 55,000 pages per month. The Xerox Phaser 6140’s recommended monthly duty cycle is 2,500 pages, with a maximum duty cycle of 40,000 pages. Clearly, this model is intended for significantly heavier workloads than those less-expensive ones.

Paired with the high duty cycle is a low cost per page. The standard cartridges (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) are rated for 11,000 pages, which works out to a cost per page of 1.4 cents for black and 2.6 cents for color. A smaller black cartridge, rated for 8,000 pages (2.3 cents per page) is also available. These costs are lower than that of the Lexmark C546dtn when printing in black (1.6 cents), and significantly so for color output (11 cents).

The HP Color Laserjet Enterprise CP4025dn is an able unit for small to medium businesses, delivering excellent quality output, a hefty duty cycle, good diagnostic functions, and an inexpensive cost per page. Just bear in mind that it's noisy, large, and heavy—all considerations for offices where space and quiet are at a premium.